King, Ship, and Sword l-16

by Dewey Lambdin

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Police Agent Fourchette didn't think much of Mйru, when they got there at last just before sunset; a wide spot in the road, most likely awash in pig-shit, inhabited by numbskulls in wooden clogs, he concluded, sharing the views of most Parisians with regard to their rural countrymen. They did call a halt for wine, bread, and cheese, water and feed bags for their horses, and a few questions.

  The local policeman, the only policeman, was a corpulent, lazy jumped-up hay-scyther, stuffed into a uniform and a lax set of duties.

  Yes, there were some travellers at the two foul inns, but none of them were Anglais, and no one even close to Lewrie's description had passed through. Of course he'd carefully looked at the registries (or he would once this intense Parisian and his entourage had departed!) and no foreigners of any kind had paused in sleepy little Mйru.

  A coach? A big, shiny black coach-and-four with a matched team of sorrels? Mais oui, a coach like that had passed through, but that had been three hours before.

  That forced Fourchette, Major Clary, Charitй, the police agents, and the befuddled troop of light cavalry into their saddles, some still chewing or pulling at spare canteens hurriedly filled with a raw local vin ordinaire a vague step away from vinegar.

  "On to Beauvais, allez vite!" Fourchette demanded. "They're in a coach, three hours ahead, but we can still catch them!"

  "If they did not change teams somewhere along the way, m'sieur Fourchette," Major Clary said as they began to clatter north, "we will be much faster, even on tired mounts."

  "Fresh team? Oui, the livery," Fourchette snapped, spurring his horse for the stables. "If they obtained fresh horses here…!"

  The old stableman was as much a slow-witted bumpkin as the policeman, interrupted from shovelling dung with a pitchfork from one of the barn stalls. "M'sieur wishes?" he asked slowly.

  "A coach came through here a few hours ago," Fourchette began impatiently. "Did you provide them a change of horses? They are criminals, wanted in Paris."

  "A coach came here, oui m'sieur" the older fellow said, taking his own sweet time to puff on his pipe, take it from his lips, and look into the bowl to see if it was drawing properly, then spit to one side. "But, I did not change horses with them."

  "So they will be slow, aha!" Fourchette started to cheer up.

  "You wish to see the coach, m'sieur? The horses?" the old man asked. "They left it all with me and gave me three hundred francs to see it back to a livery in Paris. Is it stolen, perhaps? Will you be taking it? I was looking forward to going to Paris. Quel dommage."

  "Still here? Where?" Fourchette yelped.

  "In the barn, certainement, m'sieur" the old fellow said with his pipe stem for a pointer to the barn's interior. "The old fellow is a criminal, then? One would never have guessed."

  "What old man?" Fourchette snapped as he dismounted and ordered some troopers to help him search the barn and the coach.

  "The man who left the coach here, m'sieur" the stableman said in his slow, laconic way. "A m'sieur Fleury."

  "How old? With a fair-haired woman?"

  "An old soldier, I took him to be," the stableman answered- maddeningly slowly. "Red hair and mustachios? In his fifties, I should think. Carried himself as an officer would. A colonel or general of brigade, I thought him. He travelled with his wife, but she had dark hair, mixed with grey, and quite stout. He had a limp and leaned on a cane."

  "Lewrie could not disguise himself that much," Charitй said in rising impatience, too. "Nor could his wife. Just the two of them?"

  "No, mademoiselle" was the grunted reply, 'tween smoke puffs. "M'sieur Fleury had his widowed daughter-in-law and his son with him. Poor fellow." Puff puff, look at the pipe once more, and spit.

  "What about him?" Fourchette demanded, coming back from inspecting the coach and coming away without a clue.

  "Why, he'd been kicked in the head by a horse, and let go from the army," the stableman related. "All his wits knocked from him."

  "Fair, mid-brown hair, slightly curled… with a faint scar on his cheek?" Charitй pressed, sketching a finger down her own face.

  "No, mam'selle. Dark-haired. Didn't see a scar."

  "Did they say where they were going?" Fourchette asked.

  "Did they rent horses from you?" said Charitй at the same time.

  "Did they just walk on up the road?" came a croaking snarl from the open carriage from Guillaume Choundas.

  "Hй, merde, what a sight!" The old stableman gawped at Choundas and made a gesture guaranteed in local lore to ward off evil. "One question at a time, pray you!" he pleaded with his hands before him.

  "Did… they… say… where… they… were… going, you old fool?" Fourchette. "And how!"

  "No reason to be insulting, m'sieur," the old fellow said in a sudden sulk. "M'sieur Fleury said they were going home to Rouen. He had taken his son to a physician in Paris, to see if they could do anything for him. As for how they went on, they rented an old two-horse farm waggon from me. They went up that way, the road to Beauvais."

  "What is all this nonsense about these people, Fourchette?" Choundas demanded from his carriage, slamming his cane on the floor. "Lewrie did not come this way, he's on another road right now, laughing his head off at how feeble we are!"

  "Who the Devil are we after and why, Major?" Capitaine Joseph Aulard, leader of the troop of cavalry, asked the only military man in the party. "Two Anglais or four French people? My colonel told me nothing but to catch up with this police fellow and follow his orders."

  "Two Anglais… a capitaine in their navy and his wife. As to why, you might have to ask M'sieur Fourchette, for I see no sense in it, mon vieux," Major Clary replied in a mutter, with a shrug. "I am here simply because I met the Anglais and can recognise him."

  Incroyable!" the cavalry officer spat. "There is a plot!" Fourchette growled as he fumbled to put his foot into The stirrup. "Three coaches, three couples, two to throw us off the scent! There's more to this than we thought. Organised by a cabal of Anglais secret operatives, paid for with British gold. This coach came from Paris a match to the first one we came across. They are still ahead of us. Lewrie and his wife, and another pair that aid them! Going to Beauvais We ride on!"

  "All night?" Capitaine Aulard bemoaned. "Merde. We'll all be reeling in our saddles by the time we get to Beauvais… without a proper supper too."

  The farm waggon had no suspension straps to support its jolting solid axles. Its four wheels were badly greased, if greased at all, so the intermittent keening shriek could carry for miles at night. It had been used to haul hay, bricks, lumber, dung, everything. Now the bed was liberally covered with fresh-smelling straw, under which all those trunks and valises were hidden. Still, it remained a nasty conveyance, and a slow one, to boot, for the two large horses which pulled it were old, and Sir Pulteney, at the reins again, did not press them too hard.

  The sun was down, the stars were out, and the moon hinted that it might rise above the trees and low hills several hours hence. The birds had gone to their nests and were silent. Innocent farm people were slurping their soups, dipping their breads, carving off slices of cheese and onions, and sipping their vin ordinaire, perhaps no more than an hour from retiring. The locals' own waggons and carts were in the barns, so the fugitives had the road pretty much to themselves. In the distance, only here and there, were there glims to be seen through opened shutters.

  "Odd's Blood, there it is! Just as I recall it!" Sir Pulteney announced as he turned the waggon into a much narrower farm track off the Beauvais road, the entrance almost lost in overgrowth, and so bad a lane, evidently so little-used, that in the darkness anyone chasing them would have to know of its existence and peer hard to spot it.

  Sir Pulteney shook the reins and clucked the team to a faster pace for a mile or so before slowing again. "It appears there's been a dry summer, so we should find one of the old fords and cross over the Thйrain river. After that, there are a thousand farm tracks just l
ike this, which will take us near Amiens, round it in point of fact, and, is our luck in, we'll be in Calais in a trice, haw haw!"

  "How long a trice did ye have in mind?" Lewrie asked, clawing at a maddening itch beneath his dark wig and bandage, hoping that the last Frog actor who'd worn it hadn't had crabs, lice, or fleas. The paints that Lady Imogene had daubed on him were greasy, too, and the cool night air made him conjure that his face was covered in bear fat like a Muskogee Indian's would be, to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

  "Three days in this waggon," Sir Pulteney estimated as they shared the un-sprung bench seat of the un-sprung waggon behind their plodding team. "Slower than cold treacle tonight, of course. Farmer folk hereabouts would remark upon anything on the roads at night, especially one making good time. And we can't have that, Begad! Haw!"

  If we can't make noise, then stop that brayin'! Lewrie griped.

  "Horse, pray God, at some point?" Lewrie hoped aloud. "So we can make better speed?"

  "Once we've altered our appearances and assumed new aliases, somewhere up ahead," Sir Pulteney pooh-poohed. "You and your wife… pardons, Armand and Dorothea… should try to get some rest. Hello?" he said of a sudden, drawing the creaking waggon to a full stop. "Do you hear something back there?"

  Oh, Christ, they've found us! Lewrie thought in dread.

  He stood, facing to the rear. They had come more than an English mile, Lewrie reckoned, so he had no fear of being spotted right off; there was a lot of forest behind them. As he did at sea, Lewrie opened his mouth and breathed softly, cocking his head to either side. Even above the groan of timbers, masts, and yards, and the hiss of the hull through the sea, sound carried quite far, even something as faint as the dinging of a watch bell.

  "Horses!" Lewrie said in a harsh whisper. "A lot of 'em. Jinglin'."

  "Sword scabbards and musketoons… bit chains, and such, or so I recall from my days in the Yeoman Cavalry," Sir Pulteney opined. "Cavalry… at least a troop… and a coach, too? At a fast canter or trot, it sounds like. Lud, they fell for it! Old Simenon at the stables pointed them to Beauvais, possibly Rouen, as well, where Major Fleury claimed he lived! A party being pursued could take a boat at Rouen down the Seine to the sea and board a packet at Le Havre. Let us pray they take that as a better-than-fair proposition!"

  "Once we get to Calais, though," Lewrie had to ask, losing his dread as the sound of their pursuers-if pursuers they truly were-seemed to continue on north, and coming no closer or louder along their miserably narrow and rough farm track. "How do we get aboard a packet ourselves we have no false papers? If word gets out for the police and all to be on the lookout for us?"

  "Recall, I mentioned that I'd arranged for a schooner to meet us?" Sir Pulteney breezily boasted. "The former head of our league, the greatest of us all, has a schooner yacht of his very own, and had the eager cooperation of several other merchant masters. She will be off one of our old rendezvous coves near Cap Gris Nez, to loiter near the shore 'til we turn up, then take us off the beach, and away!"

  "Uhm, Sir Pulteney… that was ten years ago, in the midst of the Terror, when the Frogs weren't anywhere near as organised, with so many police and guardsmen," Lewrie pointed out, a new nagging dread in his head. What also nagged him was that Sir Pulteney Plumb looked on their escape from France as a chance to re-live the antics of his youth, like alumni during Old Boys' Week, men of middling age who should know better, but would over-indulge in the old taverns and haunts, and dive into vigourous sports as if they were still not come to their majority.

  One last chance t'be heroic, Lewrie sarcastically deemed this; one last grand adventure… with us dead in a ditch if he fails!

  "They didn't have nigh a million men under arms back then, sir," Lewrie continued, "in their army, the Garde Nationale, and the police. There wasn't a gendarme on every street corner, and if there were, he was more like the Constable at Heme Bay, or a London parish Charlie. What do we do if even Frogs have t'have identity papers? Whip 'em up on the spot?"

  Pull 'em out o' yer small-clothes? Lewrie thought.

  What really gnawed at Lewrie, though-and even he would admit it-was that he was so completely out of his depth, and not a whit of his competence as a Commission Sea Officer, an experienced Post-Captain, would avail them. He was good with a sword, a dab-hand shot with pistol, musket, or rifled piece, but if it came to using those skills, the game was up; surrounded and out-numbered at the last resort, with his back to some wall!

  And our lives are in the hands of this daft, play-actin dolt? Lewrie almost angrily thought; Good God, we're dead as mutton!

  "Listen!" Sir Pulteney Plumb interjected, raising his hand to shush him. "Begad, I believe they've gone on! Fooled 'em, haw haw!"

  Not a single word had penetrated; the impossible geste was yet alive, in his mind; the game was still afoot!

  Fourchette and his party, with Capitaine Aulard's light horse troop, reached the gates of Beauvais round midnight; even the skilled riders thighs chafed, their legs shuddery-weak, and their fundaments saddle-sore. Their horses were certainly played out, by then capable of only a plodding, head-down walk, lathered with sweat and reeking of ammonia, Men swayed in their saddles, barely able to keep their eyes open, their balance astride, and some, once the pace slackened, had nodded off completely, trusting their horse to follow its fellows and keep its feet.

  Beauvais was a fairly large town, a garrison town, and with so many roads passing through it, there were watchmen posted at its portes day and night. At one time before the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon Bonaparte had contemplated an invasion of southern England cross the Channel, so the town had been mindful of spies as the lead elements of the armies had started to assemble, before it was called off. Beauvais's authorities might have slackened their watchfulness after that, but that did not mean that they had let their guard down completely.

  Yet with all that watchfulness at the city gates, there was no sign of a two-horse farm waggon with four occupants, no M'sieur Fleury and family declaring himself at the southern gate, and after checking with the town's constabulary, no one of that name or description noted in the registries at any of the town's overnight lodgings! No concierge could report any Fleurys taking an appartement; no landlord, hastily wakened, knew of anyone suddenly leasing a house at such a late hour!

  "We would have caught up with them if they were ahead of us on the road," Major Clary sleepily muttered over a welcome cup of coffee as he slumped, exhausted, on his elbows at a rough plank table in the inn at which they had retired. "Ergo, they never were on the Beauvais road. Another goose-egg, messieurs. Un zйro!"

  "That damned villageois, that pйquenot stableman! Either he is in league with them, or he's an idiot!" Guillaume Choundas accused as he sat on a padded chair nearby, his hand clawed round a brandy glass. A few hours on horseback, even most of the day and night at ease in a comfortable carriage, had caused him even more pain than it had the others. His iron-braced leg throbbed, his abused bottom was between numbness and muscle spasms, and the cool, damp night air even made his ravaged face's nerves now and then spike with knife-like pain, forcing him to set down the glass and reach up to soothe it. "Someone should ride back there and have the fool arrested! Tortured 'til he talks!"

  "He told us only what he was told," Charitй de Guilleri numbly mumbled over her own cup of coffee. "His sort is too dense to lie, too much the ox to be curious… or risk his life for another." Her first bleak year spent with her distant relations in the village of Rambouillet had shown Charitй the dimness of rustique French people!

  This tavern had been about ready to shut its doors for the night when their party had clattered up, demanding hot food, spirits, and lodgings. The tavernier and his barman, cook, and waiters, now kept far past their bedtimes, clattered, clomped, and silently sulked and sneered as only Frenchmen can, while the hot meal was prepared. Its arrival was delayed by the excuse that the cookfire had ebbed, and even though the interlopers accepted the quickly doubled prices and willi
ngly paid in gold franc coins, their party was still unwelcome.

  The door to the street opened, and Matthieu Fourchette and Capitaine Aulard clomped in, the cavalryman looking exhausted and Fourchette looking grim. Fourchette ordered brandy at the tin-covered bar counter, Aulard opting for a mug of beer, before they came to the table to join their compatriots and slouch in matching manner.

  "The Colonel of the local regiment… the idle time-server!" Fourchette spat after a deep draught of brandy. "He finally allowed us audience, after more than half an hour!" Fourchette swiped impatiently at the hair that had fallen over his face. "It was only after we declared our mission was ordered by the First Consul that he got out of bed!"

  "So we start out at once?" Major Clary asked.

  "No, mon cher Major, we start at dawn!" Fourchette said with a snarl. "He's sending riders to Rouen, Amiens, Le Havre, and Dieppe as we speak, but will not send out his troops 'til the sun is up."

  "We do get remounts, and he did offer my men use of the barracks for the night," Aulard sleepily told them. "That is something, I suppose." When he lifted his beer mug, his hand shook with tiredness.

  "Such bourgeois… shop-keepers and clock-watchers would have lost their heads a few years ago," Guillaume Choundas told them with relish; in his heyday during the Terror, he'd sent more than his share from his own navy to such a fate, and looked as if he'd be delighted to see a few more heads tumble into the bloody basket. "Perhaps a report should be sent to Bonaparte, Fourchette… to encourage the others."

  "Oh, for God's sake…," Fourchette said with a weary groan. "I may lose mine if we fail, not you, you…!"

  "Where will the good colonel send his patrols, m'sieur?" Major Clary said, his mind still sharp, even at that hour. "We did not catch up with them because, as I was telling the others, they were never on the Beauvais road… They did not come to Beauvais. Perhaps did not ever have the intention of risking discovery at the gates. Yet there are dozens of farm lanes and un-mapped tracks. They turned off somewhere along the way. East or west? To skirt Beauvais and proceed to Rouen or Le Havre? It seems to me that, even if the entire regiment turns out and is split into files of only ten or fifteen men, it will be impossible to scour all of the lanes. And all the while, those we seek will make their way to the coast… in disguise, assuming we are not following another false lead."